Hi all,
as you may know, MediaWiki supports video embedding (from sites such as
YouTube, for example) only via separately installable extensions. Many of
these extensions are parser hooks (such as <youtube>), and as such they are
a bit difficult to use for the average editor and many video embedding
extensions are also very hacky and may even contain cross-site scripting
(XSS) vulnerabilities.
What's the solution? A video extension that supports multiple different
providers, is easy to use and is secure. So far none of the existing
extensions really match all the given criteria. Until now, that is. Earlier
today I committed the Video extension (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Video) into the official MediaWiki
Subversion repository at
http://svn.wikimedia.org/.
The Video extension was originally written by David Pean, who is best known
for his work on the social tools (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_tools),
back in 2007 for ArmchairGM (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia#ArmchairGM)
and it saw limited use outside ArmchairGM, but the code was never finished.
For example, while you could add videos to the wiki, there was no way to
delete a video, which would've been a rather easy way for a vandal to troll
the wiki.
During the past summer, I improved various social extensions (see
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Social_tools/Phase_II), including Video. I
added support for deleting (and partially for undeleting) videos and I wrote
plenty of new provider classes. While the Video extension is in pretty good
shape now, it's not yet ready and it needs *your* help! Like I wrote
earlier, the deletion of videos is possible, but undeletion support is not
as functional, due to the way how Special:Undelete does things.
[[Video:Foo]] links can't yet be tracked via Special:WhatLinksHere. And, of
course, I'm not sure if Video supports your favorite provider yet. :-)
If you are a developer who's interested in video support or you know a
developer who'd be interested in helping out, please see
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Video and
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Commit_access (if you don't yet have SVN write
access).
Thanks and regards,
--
Jack Phoenix
MediaWiki developer